Consumers of video content are increasingly making use of Digital Video Recorders (DVR) to view content, such as television programming, on a time-shifted basis. Users of such systems are typically able to “record” programming which may be made available on a particular schedule, allowing them to consume the content later, at a more convenient time.
The advent and growing popularity of DVRs in the households of television viewers presents a unique problem to advertisers and the networks or service providers that air advertising content. Because users have the ability to view programming in a non-linear fashion (i.e., the ability to fast-forward, pause, slow-motion or entirely skip content) advertising content can be overlooked and in some instances never be seen by the intended audience.
Further, although it is often desirable to insert local or otherwise targeted advertisements, such as television commercials, into such content, doing so on-the-fly imposes real-time processing requirements which may be difficult or costly to implement. In addition, on-the-fly insertion may also be problematic when users are provided with the ability to consume content in a non-linear fashion. For example, when a user is viewing a portion of content and then quickly rewinds into a commercial break, it may not be possible to identify and insert an appropriate advertisement into that commercial break on-the-fly, without interruption of the user's experience.
What is needed therefore is a system and method of adapting advertising content in a DVR environment that dynamically adapts advertising content to be relevant no matter when the program carrying the advertisement is being viewed.